Pussy Riot prison protest puts Russia's prisons under harsh scrutiny

The grim conditions of Russia's "Gulag archipelago" have been brought back to
the world's attention by the hunger strike of Pussy Riot member Nadezhda
Tolokonnikova, reports Roland Oliphant in Mordovia

Roland Oliphant, video by Olaf Koens

2:00PM BST 03 Oct 2013

Ms Tolokonnikova may have ended her nine-day hunger strike on Tuesday after the chairman of Vladimir Putin’s human rights watchdog negotiated an agreement between her and the federal prison service, but her protest continues.

She made it clear through her lawyers that she would resume her protest if the prison and the government did not meet her demands, including a full inspection of conditions in Women’s Prison Colony Number 14 and full protection for all inmates who give testimony.

Women's Prison Colony Number 14 (ROLAND OLIPHANT FOR THE TELEGRAPH)

The Pussy Riot punk group member also wants to be moved to another prison unless deputy prison governor Yury Kuprianov, who she says threatened to kill her, is prosecuted.

Ms Tolokonnikova’s husband Pyotr Verzilov, who has been trying to gain access to his wife since Friday, told the Telegraph on Wednesday evening that he has still not been allowed to see his wife in the prison hospital she was transferred to on Sunday. “Effectively there is a blockade in place,” he said.

Inspectors from the presidential human rights council said on Tuesday that several of Ms Tolokonnikova’s complaints about colony 14, including working 12 to 16 hours a day seven days a week and the use of select inmates to maintain order – a system banned in 2010 – were true.

And even from the outside, it is possible to gain a sense of what the Pussy Riot is talking about. The village of Parts, which hosts Colony 14, must be one of the world's bleakest corners.

A couple of shops, one of them shut, sit at the crossroads where the drive to the prison gate meets the main highway. Stray dogs and geese roam the waste ground between the prison and the road, and a handful of traders sell toiletries, clothes and confectionary to guards, visitors, and passers-by.

The entrance to Women's Prison Colony Number 14 (ROLAND OLIPHANT FOR THE TELEGRAPH)

By the prison gates, a huge poster advertises the uniforms and specialist work wear churned out by the prison workshops.

Colony 14 is one of several such facilities dotted along a long country road seven hours drive from Moscow. Flanked by scrubby trees, corrugated steel fences, and signs warning drivers not to stop, this stretch of highway represents one of the last remnants of the notorious system of prison camps that Alexander Solzhenitsyn dubbed “the Gulag Archipelago”.

Little appears to have changed since. Ms Tolokonnikova's protest arose from what she described as a culture of exploitation, abuse and effective slavery that would be familiar to any reader of Solzhenitsyn’s works.

“Our first priority is to get Nadya transferred to another prison, because we are sure the authorities here will not forgive her for what she has said. And secondly, of course, to change the situation in the prison,” explained Mr Verzilov, as he shuffled documents in the visitor’s waiting room outside the prison gates.

He has remained in the nearest nearby large town, Zubnaya Polyana, trying to coordinating a campaign to be allowed to see her.

Whatever the outcome of the appeal, Ms Tolokonnikova, who is one year into a two-year sentence for hooliganism incited by religious hatred, has put this depressed part of the country - and especially its prisons - under intense scrutiny.

In 1931, the Soviet Union’s central administration of labour camps – the GULAG – set up a series of camps in the deep forests of Mordovia, some 200 miles southeast of Moscow.

German prisoners of war held here in the 1940s and 1950s built most of the nearby towns, including Yavas, the village where the prison administration is still headquartered. The dissident Ukrainian historian Valentyn Moroz finished his samizdat work “Report from the Beria Reservation” during a three-year stint here for “anti-Soviet agitation” in the 1960s.

But while the most notorious Gulag camps in the Urals and the Russian Far East were abandoned with the fall of the Soviet Union, the Mordovia colonies remain an integral part of the Russian penal system. And they retain a fearsome reputation.

In an open letter to the authorities announcing her hunger strike last Monday, Ms Tolokonnikova described hearing about Mordovian prisons while in pre-trial detention in Moscow.

"Those who never did time in Mordovia never did time at all,” she wrote, quoting a prison saying. “When they send you off to Mordovia, it is as though you're headed to the scaffold.”

Mr Verzilov walks back to his lodgings as he continues his campaign to get his wife transferred (ROLAND OLIPHANT FOR THE TELEGRAPH)

She went on to describe working 17-hour days to meet impossible production quotas in the uniform-sewing workshops on pain of humiliating collective punishments, filthy sanitary conditions, and an unofficial system of bullying used by the prison administration to keep prisoners in line.

Neither Colony 14 nor the chief administration for the Yavas camps was prepared to comment when the Telegraph visited, although the prison authorities have previously denied the accusations, and in a statement accused Mr Verzilov of using his wife's open letter as blackmail to get them to give into demands to transfer Ms Tolokonnikova to another prison.

But the letter – which Mr Verzilov claims has become the most-read text to be published on the Russian internet in recent years – has caused a storm of controversy in a country where prison conditions are notoriously rough, but seldom discussed publicly.

The authorities have promised investigations, the governors of the prison are reported to have been recalled to Moscow for consultations, and the scandal even prompted the Kremlin-friendly broadsheet Izvestia to investigate who actually buys the uniforms the women are sewing .The biggest customer turns out to be Vostok Servis, a specialist clothing supplier owned by a former United Russia deputy called Vladimir Golovnev. Colony 14 earned 70 million rubles (£1.3 million) from the clothing business last year, the paper reported.

Svetlana Bakhmina, a former lawyer for Mikhail Khodorkovsky’s Yukos oil company who served two and a half years in Colony 14, has recalled being treated like a “second class human being.”

“Everything Tolokonnikova wrote about punishment – standing on the parade ground, being banned from using the store or the sanitary facilities – was true in my time.” she said in a widely published blog post. “The living conditions are appalling…speaking out takes great courage. With my long sentence I immediately realised there was no point in fighting back. Most think the same way – everyone wants to get out on parole or at least not make their already terrible existence worse.”

In contrast, Yevgenia Khasis, who is serving 18 years at the prison for the 2009 murder of human rights lawyer Stanislav Markelov, has accused Ms Tolokonnikova of effectively fabricating accounts of abuse to serve her own ends.

“Ninety percent of inmates and staff are now just tired of this situation and do not approve of Nadya’s behaviour,” she told the Komsomolskaya Pravda tabloid.

It was revenge for drawing such attention to the prison that Mr Verzilov believes is behind the refusal to let him see his wife.

“It has caused massive trouble for them. Dozens of agencies have launched inquiries: the Presidential Commission on Human Rights, the Prosecutor’s Office at local and federal level, the Investigative Committee at local and federal level – I could go on,” he said.

For local people in this depressed region of Russia, the prisons are more than just a feature of the landscape – they are an economic lifeline.

There are at least 22 prison colonies in Mordovia today, according to the regional prison administration, and almost every other driver or pedestrian in the area of the Yavas camps is dressed in the blue camouflage or dress uniform of the Federal Prisons Service.

In Yavas, the local administrative centre that began life as a prisoner processing centre in the 1930s and where the prison administration still has its headquarters, locals spoken to by the Daily Telegraph had no time for the allegations of brutality and ill treatment described by the region’s most famous serving prisoner.

“There’re no factories around here. The colonies are our jobs,” said Nazdezhda Ivanova, herself a retired guard who said she had worked in the prisons for 25 years before taking her pension.

“It’s rubbish, what those human rights people write. The prisoners work eight hours a day, just like us and they are fed extremely well. As for beatings, I ask you, who is going to beat anyone?” she added.

Outside the prison, a work party of women in regulation green fatigues and white headscarves were led down a muddy path by a guard.

“Don’t feel sorry for them,” said a woman emerging from the shop. “They live better than we do out here.”